Liz Theoharis

This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance corporations are making record profits has been termed “the great unwinding.” And it couldn’t be more cruelly ironic.

There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Will we continue to condemn tens of millions of us to cruel and unnecessary poverty, while feeding the drive to authoritarianism or even an all-American version of fascism, or will we move swiftly and compassionately to begin lifting the load of poverty and so strengthen the very foundation of our democracy?

In so many other ways, our society has refused to relinquish old and odious thinking and is instead “dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred” through the portal of the pandemic.

The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.

Dr. King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” a statement that should ring some bells in April 2021.